Miracle Beans! (Leguminosae)

March 23rd, 2010


We cook them, we fry them, we grind them, we do all kind of processing and enjoy a good bean product. Today I'm taking a closer look at these miracle beans and their uses, it's quite incredible what you can make of it. Word wide nearly 250 Billion kg a year. That's about 35 kg for every human on earth. The bean is high in cholesterol free protein, rich in fiber, low in fat, complex carbohydrates and full of vitamins and minerals and other good things your body needs.

There are many different Beans or Leguminos as they are called, for instance:


Uses

There are so many uses, it is difficult to really capture all their uses, but some are:
80% of all consumed oils in the U.S. are soy based.

Workflow of Soybean Oil Processing



Other by-products which are extracted are Lecitin (bydegumming) . Lecithin is widely used for applications in human food (fully digestable, emulsifiers, candy bars, etc.), animal feed, pharmaceutical (cosmetics), paint, and other industrial applications. Yet another extract which has great value and use.
De-fatted Soy flower another product can be found virtually everywhere acts as a natural preservative and protein source. E.g. in bread, pancake mixes, pasta, doughnuts, pet food and many other foods. Particularly to replace meat this soy flower is processed into textured soy protein. This is the basis for all vegan products you can find.
George Washington Carver pioneered alot of the soy bean uses in the chemical industry beside the peanut research he conducted.

Soymilk Processing Workflow



Benefits


Soybeans can lower the risk of:

but don't eat too much of it, because there are also certain dangers.

Dangers


Problems occur like with all things, if you eat too much of it. It can include irregularities in men and women because of Isoflavones. Some research indicates that Isoflavones, a Estrogen like substance found in plants causes problems. This can reduce the natuarally produced estrogen in the human body.

Todo


Interesting Video about Beans

References:

3D iPhone Development - What do you need?

November 8th, 2009 I had a interesting request recently. Is development for the iPhone/iPod touch a good idea? Is it worth it?

Well, as usual if your idea is not that great, then probably not. On the other hand if you put some effort in it and you realize something interesting, then probably yes! If you see games being developed (or better ported) like this then you will realize that this thing is far from just a telephone. Its a fully fledged hand-held gaming device! Interesting enough, how did Sega manage to release their game so fast? Whats going on? What do I need?

iPhone Business in general

Like all embedded devices the half-life time of an software application in the iPhone world is rather low. Studies so far have found that people tend to use free software (no costs) roughly once or twice and then loose interest.

Of course such a generalization is not without exceptions. You can exclude this behavior for everyday utilities (e.g. twitter, mail) and especially games. The Apple iPhone application store is growing rapidly an so are the users. The Sales in this field are sometimes very impressive if you have a "good" idea. (Sales currently roughly ~3000USD/day, app cost 1 unit == 0.99USD)

iPhone Business in Japan

Let me briefly digress for our domestic market in japan. Sales in the past have for the iPhone ranged from roughly 300,000 units per year. This is a lower estimation and will now sharply change as Softbank gives away the devices for free.

In the rest of the world the device has a "viral" effect meaning that sales are going very, very, good. As a direct result so are also the sales for top ranked applications in the "app store".

There was a recently a interesting article about "japanese hating the iphone" which turned out to be wrong. Ref. here (In this referece there are also sales numbers.)

Application Sales

Here is an interesting article how to estimate sales from iTunes ranking. Unfortunately apps can't be too expensive, See this. How much monkey can you idealy make? Super Monkey ball is priced at 9.99USD because Sega has a lot of assets to support this low price vs. dev costs.

iPhone Application Development in General

Bascially the iPhone is a COCOA based handheld device running XNU (also called, MacOS, stipped version). Building an application which is based on using the iPhone provided API is fairly easy and fast. The API itself provides nearly no capsulation of the OpenGL ES interface (stripped down version of OpenGL for Embedded Devices) which means that you can work with it directly to build an application (XCode).

If you write everything from scratch and use no tools like game engines, it will initially take some time to abstract the OpenGL ES interface to your requirements. One full-time developer maybe around 2-3 weeks. Parallel to this the developers can work out UI flow, Gameplay, Program structure (e.g. UML, State diagrams etc. for core concepts). After that you can start with your product desgin implementation. The time here again, depends on the complexity. Monkey Ball was ported not re-implemented which saved a lot of time.

Game Engines

The problem with a complex game is that you need many components like a Physics engine and a 3D Game engine in general, scripting support and so on.

You could rely on tools helping you for this process, e.g.

Case Study, Monkey Ball

Sega of course has all this already, in the case of Super Monkey ball they just needed to port their code to the iPhone system. (This is the reason initial development was so fast).

Monkey Ball from Sega exists already since quite some time.

I think their game engine is C or C++ based and easily convertable to other platforms as they tend to support C. So if you want to write everything from scratch, it will take more time.

OpenSource Example

A sample application using OpenGL ES (OpenSource) and the iPhone API, Molecule (please note that even though the name of the file is .tar.bz2 the file is actually an tar.gz) A description is for instance here..

People

I think the most important aspect of the iPhone/iPodTouch are the usage of the accelerometers. See this for instance..

Finding iPhone developers (programmers) currently is difficult I think, they are still rather rare. The core competencies here are,..

Programmer:

Artists

Useful/Mandatory Tools

Hardware

Licences

Supplemental

Rough Estimation

Sega's team used to port a simple working example from their Monkey Ball product to the iPhone 2 Weeks. They had a working engine, professional developers and artists. So what do you probably need for the average 3D game on the iPhone?



To give a good estimation, it must be pretty clear how complicated the application will be. Then maybe you could make a valid assumption of how many (mythical) man-months you would need.

What do you think? Where am I wrong? What did I forget?

VNC Robot

October 8th, 2009 Today at work I had a interesting request. Make a screenshot of a Flash application and send this the customer by mail every 5 minutes or so. First I though that it would be best to utilize some Actionscript with PHP/GD. This was ok but the other guys seemed to prefer some other hack. So I came up with using something like Browsershots, or some CutyCapt/IECapt, Python, Django combination. This seemed too complicated though.

So I finally settled with using VNC Robot. This thing is actually really funny, its like (shudder) Windows Scripting Host in VNC. Perfect!.

Originally I also looked into Ruby/Mechanize and other alike but with Flash thats a problem these days...

Here is a sample script I created and other nifty examples can be found here. 

# Open Firefox from start menu
Mouse move to=x:145,y:755 wait=1000
Mouse click count=1 

# Go to location bar
Mouse move to=x:262,y:65 wait=1000
Mouse click count=1

# Go to webpage
# Press Ctrl+l wait=1000
Press Backspace count=20
Type "http://10.0.0.9" wait=1000
Press Enter wait=6000

# Go to login form
Press Tab wait=1000
Type "usernamewashere" wait=1000
Press Tab wait=1000
Type "passwordwashere" wait=1000

# Skip over the "Do you want to remember password question"
Press Enter wait=1000
Press Enter wait=1000

Wait 10000

# Take a screenshot and send it to John
Screenshot /tmp/stock.jpg

Sendmail subject="XYZ Application stock on {_DATE}" from="root@yourmachine" to="foobar@blahblubb.org"
 server="localhost" attach="/tmp/stock.jpg"

# Close the browser so that we can rerun the script safely
Press Alt+F4 wait=500
Press Alt+F4 wait=500
The result looks like this (scaled down).

Git vs. VFAT

June 17th, 2009 Ever copied your Git development tree to a VFAT Filesystem media? Well, if you did then you probably encountered this later:

fatal: Not a git repository

The fix is pretty simple. Git depends on the uppercase file naming of the .git/HEAD file. So if you find it to be lower case then:

mv .git/head .git/HEAD

Dear Git-developers,

why is such an insanity necessary?

Erlang EEP7 on R13 VM?

April 27th, 2009 I happened to run into Alceste Scalas in the Erlang IRC channel and I asked him about his EEP7 implementation and R13 compatibility. Seems that it will be soon also running on R13 ! 

02:54 < _br_> alceste: nice, good to catch you in the irc. Hey did you happen to get your ffi things running on 
              R13 or R12 ?
02:55 < _br_> alceste: sorry to bother you with this :\
03:10 < alceste> _br_: not yet, but some guy on the erlang-questions mailing list was able to port the patches 
                 and (apparently) make them work
03:10 < alceste> _br_: i'm going to verify it and release updated patches ASAP
03:17 < _br_> alceste: Thank you ! Thats really great :)


Erlang-Questions Mailing list reg. EEP7 on R13A.